


The Age of Unfolding

by lonelywalker



Category: The Art of Fielding - Chad Harbach
Genre: Baseball, Canon Gay Relationship, Canonical Character Death, Character of Color, Epistolary, F/M, Families of Choice, Future Fic, M/M, School Reunion, Yuletide 2012
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-14
Updated: 2012-12-14
Packaged: 2017-11-21 03:16:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/592831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/pseuds/lonelywalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's been twenty-five years since Owen graduated from Westish, but now he's being called back - to see old friends, play one more baseball game, and perhaps lay a few ghosts to rest.</p><p>Major spoilers for the entire book from the very beginning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Age of Unfolding

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lenore](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lenore/gifts).



> Thanks to [Isis](http://archiveofourown.org/users/isis) for the beta. Any and all remaining errors are my own.

Dear Guert,

It has been twenty-six years since you died, cold and alone in the home you loved, surrounded by the books that had brought you there.

Twenty-five years ago I graduated from Westish College, although even as I stood among friends and peers, listening to speeches filled with pomp and inspiration, I felt I had already left that place far behind. 

I originally applied for the Trowell fellowship on a whim, partly because no other Westish student had ever won. I spent the following months ruing my success, because it meant an inevitable parting from you, and from the school and the people I had begun to love almost as earnestly and selflessly as you did.

I never asked if you put in a good word for me with the Trowells the way you argued the Maria Westish Award my way. Part of me would like to think that you left me a direction in life the way you offered Mike a job and put Henry on a plane, the way you sat down with Pella when she was three years old and wiped her tears and told her all about a cross, one-legged sea captain and his monomaniacal hunt for a white whale.

Had you lived, you would be in your late eighties now. Not so old, necessarily, but ancient for an Affenlight. I’ve never entertained any firm beliefs in an afterlife, but in my more sentimental moments I like to think there is a universe where you bought your house by the lake and still live there happily, sometimes with Pella, sometimes with me, during the holidays with both of us, and perhaps Mike and Henry too. You grow pumpkins and write your novel and are content.

Today, in my own world, I live mostly in New York City. My husband and I have a lovely Manhattan apartment neither of us really sees much of – he sleeps there and lives on stage, I seem to do most of my living and sleeping on airplanes and in libraries. We are middle-aged and bohemian and pleasantly boring. I still smoke joints and go to protests and twist arms into more forward-thinking environmental initiatives. In a world that is still somehow not the ecological apocalypse I foresaw when I was young, these are pleasantly boring activities too. 

Two days ago, I left our apartment at six in the morning, my husband nothing more than tousled black hair and a muscular arm poking out over the comforter.

“I’m going,” I said, writing much the same thing on a note by the bed. The note also explained where, and for how long, as well as the flight numbers. However much I tell him during months like these, nothing ever sticks. He has room enough in his mind for The Play, whichever one it happens to be this spring, and everything else becomes extraneous.

He lifted a hand, waving, and I kissed his palm. “Love you.” The same syllables were sleepily muttered into the pillow.

I picked up my bag and tablet for the plane, and went downstairs to meet the cab.

Perhaps you'd like to know something about him, this mysterious Broadway man I married. Well. We met fifteen years ago and you bear no small responsibility for the circumstances. 

When you first taught me about opera, I paid very little attention, possibly because we were driving out on our very first date, on our way to spend our first night together, and I had far too much on my mind. After you died, everything you owned went to Pella, of course, and she was kind enough to ask me what I wanted – books, papers, records. It was a sweet, heartbreaking gesture and I took very little. But I remember sitting in your office with Mike, drinking coffee, looking through your old LPs and wishing I knew enough to really appreciate them. I suspect they were mostly given to thrift stores or interested professors. (I confess I stole the mugs.)

Years later, I moved to New York via Chicago, LA, and Boston, and somehow convinced myself to attend _Faust_ , which I remembered finding in your stereo days after you died. It was, perhaps, the music you heard last of all, and I was prepared to be overcome with melancholy. I was also prepared to be bored out of my mind. Instead I found myself seated next to a young man who was also attending the performance alone. His name was Wai Anderson. He was a Chinese-American singer, dancer, and actor whose most recent role had brought him all the way from La Jolla to New York. We were both Californians, former drama majors, and entirely out of our depth.

It took an hour to get his number, a week to move in together (convenience before romance, always), a year to make my mother happy and me an honest man. Marriage was a political statement at the time, but it was love, too. It still is. Sometimes I worry whether you'd like him, whether you'd approve, as though you were my father as well as my lover and teacher and friend. I hope you would.

I told Wai about you sooner than I'd hoped. The nature of our relationship meant I never took any photographs of you while we were together, but that old photo from the register has traveled with me to Tokyo, and from coast to coast on my return to the States. Perhaps he wasn't exactly the man I knew, that young Guert Affenlight with his long hair and bicycle and forty years yet to live, but he was close enough. 

Wai was as fascinated by the photograph as I had been, and he nodded as I explained everything to him, omitting only a certain felonious disinterment. When I finished, he hugged me tight, forehead creased in thought. "You know," he said, "I think I've read his book."

I might never have visited your home state but for an idle afternoon in a bookstore and a teenage crush on the genius behind _The Sperm-Squeezers_. Today Wisconsin is something of a second home and I pass through Mitchell Airport three or four times a year to see the dear friends who have become my family, for Thanksgiving or Christmas or sometimes both. Wai comes with me when he’s in that anxious-nervous state between projects, convinced he’ll never be hired again, despite the fact I’d cast him in anything and often have. 

"Owen!" 

There was a small crowd in front of Arrivals, but I saw my chauffeur for the day immediately. He gets a little taller every time I come. In Wisconsin, land of the Germans, he's nothing out of the ordinary. In New York he'd be a giant.

My nephew Ev. Your grandson. It would be unfair to you both to leap to comparisons, and it’s clear to see in his golden-amber eyes that the Schwartz genes have had their impact too, but he’s tall and square-shouldered just like you were, and his brown hair has just a suggestion of that copper-red tone you gave Pella. He plays quarterback for his high school, just like his father and grandfather, and he’s somehow grown up surrounded by books without learning to hate them. On his fourteenth birthday I gave him _The Sperm-Squeezers_ , a real paper edition from the 80s. He quietly took me aside and asked if I’d been his grandfather’s lover.

“You all meet up every year and send me to bed early,” he said. “When I was little I assumed you’d killed someone.”

“We all loved him very much,” I explained, which was better than trying to explain blow jobs on couches or Henry sobbing his way through cereal.

He smiled, that knowing, slightly sad Affenlight smile. You would have taken him fishing and rowing and taught him everything you ever knew about _Moby-Dick_. But then, Ev has parents for that. The best parents he could ever have.

He's seventeen now, tall and gorgeous and shyly smart, in love with an old rustbucket of a car that dates back to my undergraduate degree. In the fall he'll be attending Westish as a student, playing for the Harpooners, washing dishes in the dining hall, the weight of history on his shoulders. Evert Affenlight-Schwartz: he'll rule the world one day if he wants.

“You’ll never guess who’s here,” Ev said on the drive up to Westish, nothing on the broken radio, the scenery as bland as it used to be in your day.

“You might as well tell me, then.”

“Starblind. Can you believe it? I can’t wait to see you guys together again.”

“Ev, you never saw us together the first time around.”

He looked over a fraction too long for truly good car safety, but just long enough to give me that time-honored look of forbearance all teenagers claim over their elders. “Dad’s talked about it enough. That’s all he and Skrimmer do. Watch games and drink and talk about the good old days. I wish they’d just make out already.”

“It’s been almost thirty years, kiddo. It’s not going to happen.” 

For a while after graduation, when Henry went off to the minors with all the enthusiasm and talent he’d ever had, we assumed he’d never be back. I’d assumed the same thing about myself when I first arrived. I cared absolutely nothing for the location, but that it was in a reasonably liberal state far from my mother, and not much for the college, but that I’d won a scholarship and it gave me the chance to listen to those beautiful Affenlight speeches a few times a year. 

When you and I became friends, though, I began to imagine the place as it is to me today: somewhere I will leave repeatedly, sometimes even gladly, but to which I will always return. You anchor me here, in life or in death. You and my friends, and the history we share.

“Starblind…” I mused. “He didn’t even graduate.”

“He was drafted. Anyway, who cares? Like you don’t want to see him too.”

I was interested to know how his abs and tattoos looked after twenty-five years, I have to admit. Adam and I had never been close, but we’d been teammates and that's closer than many people ever get.

“Is your mother here?”

“My mom?” Ev glanced over again, as if I’d just suggested his mother had also once been pitcher for the Yankees. “She’s coming up tomorrow. She had classes today. I’ll probably be running taxi service for her too.”

I don’t know if you ever had ambitions for Pella other than to grow up healthy and happy and not entirely resembling someone raised by wolves, but she’s certainly had ambitions for herself, and the Affenlight name won’t disappear from academia anytime soon.

Mike and Pella divorced when Ev was twelve. It was as amicable as these things get. She lectures at the University of Chicago these days, publishes with a fervor, and writes opinion pieces for the _New Yorker_. Officially her research interests tend toward female political theorists. Unofficially she teaches a seminar in Melville and Nietzsche she’s probably had memorized since kindergarten.

I’m never sure who Pella’s dating. Mike lives alone, ostensibly, but with Ev during the summer and often with Henry year-round. Henry had a successful career, has a healthier bank account than the rest of us put together, but he’s past playing age now and neither eloquent enough to commentate nor motivational enough to coach, at least in his own opinion. The last time we talked, he told me he was thinking of re-enrolling at Westish, getting a degree in sports psychology or business administration or something similarly hip.

Did you imagine me as the happily married, boringly monogamous member of our little quartet? Perhaps you did. I suspect I was never as mysterious in your eyes as I hoped to be.

I wish I could say that Westish hasn’t changed at all in the past quarter-century, but at least I can state with confidence that it has changed very little. The town is still small and quiet, Bartleby’s still bawdy on the weekends, Melville standing tall in the quad.

Mike and Pella started out renting an apartment, but later on, when Pella had finished with Harvard and was pregnant with Ev, and it became apparent that Henry and I, often with Wai in tow, would be stopping by several times a year, they joined the ranks of proud American homeowners. Today their house is well-kept, the lawn green, a husky who may well be one of Contango’s relatives welcoming all comers. 

“Buddha!”

“Michael!”

If Mike was twice my size when we were at school together, he must be three times my size now. We bumped fists and hugged and swapped a dozen nonsensical phrases while Ev rolled his eyes at the inanity of his elders and lugged my bags inside.

“Henry’s here?” I asked.

“He’s at the college, poking around.” Mike had had a receding hairline at the age of twenty-three. Today, his Harpooners cap rarely leaves his head. “The nostalgia gets to all of us sooner or later.”

My room, or what is intermittently my room, is on the ground floor: there’s still a stack of my books there from the last time, some shirts in the closet. I feel like a teenage son who only infrequently comes home. My mother probably wishes I felt so much guilt about visiting her even less frequently, but she loves to come to New York and see the musicals and the museums while pestering Wai and me about giving her some grandchildren.

“Ev says Starblind’s back.”

Mike sat down on the bed. “Sure. He said hello the other day at the diamond. Looks good. That model wife of his isn’t around though.”

“I thought they broke up because he was seen with that TV sitcom girl?” 

“Henry says no.”

Some days I rue my deficient knowledge of tabloid journalism. “Anyone else back yet?”

“Rick sent an e-mail. But we only had the four of you from that year, even if Starblind didn’t stick around long enough to graduate. Don’t worry. We’ll have our five minutes of swinging and then it’s mostly beer.”

“I thought it was supposed to be a whole game.” Admittedly, five minutes in the batter’s box amounted to about as much time as I’d ever actually played as a student.

“We’ll see.”

By the time I unpacked what little I’d brought it was still only mid-afternoon. I borrowed Ev’s bike, a mud-caked thing with about 64 gears, and pedaled over to the college.

I’m sure you remember how the summers are here. The weather is beautiful, utterly perfect for lying in the grass with your boyfriend, books ignored to one side as you simply lie still and feel the sun on your eyelids, his hand warm in yours. I’ve taught summer school here twice, and even the good students can’t help but shift restlessly in their seats, yearning for an excuse to study _Lear_ down by the lake.

Ecologically speaking, you may be relieved to know that Westish has moved on a great deal from its bureaucratic reluctance of twenty-five years ago. Part of the college's success in that area is doubtless influenced by its lack of such success in others – the buildings have barely expanded at all, although doubtless tuition has risen. Now we have emissions caps, solar panels, attempts at carbon neutrality… We're getting there, and the future hasn't turned out to be as much of a flooded wasteland as I once imagined. 

I locked up the bike in the Small Quad alongside Melville, and slipped in the door to Phumber, admiring graffiti old and new as I climbed the stairs. You used to live there too, I think, although I don’t know which room. How strange that Henry and I would be assigned to the same dorm so many years later.

I was so lost in my thoughts of you that I just about headbutted the stomach of a man descending the stairs.

“I am so sorry,” I said, and it took me a moment to recognize him – an Asian man I instinctively thought of as much older, even though he must have been my age. “Steve?”

“Owen!”

We hugged just as the _other_ Asian Steve, who had been his roommate, appeared. The two of them had lived across the landing from Henry and me for three years – we’d always presumed that the student housing department had been particularly unimaginative when pairing up roomies. They had both pursued science degrees and were more in Henry’s area of expertise than mine, but living in such close proximity for so long had meant we’d had a few conversations, largely about plumbing problems and where to purchase baking soda. 

“I read your book,” the first Steve, Steven Huong, said. “I was so pleased that I’m not in it.”

I smiled. “Well, of course. It’s fiction.”

“Fiction,” he said, and grinned, tapping his nose. “Sure, Dunne. Your secret’s safe with me.”

Up on the top landing I found myself staring at the door to 405. How many times had I unlocked it during my time here? I’d always simply done so without looking, because it was mine, it was home. Would anyone be living there now? I didn’t think the summer students were put up in Phumber, and the Steves had just checked out their old room, but… I turned the handle and opened the door.

The room seemed strangely white and strangely smaller than it had ever been before, even though I certainly haven’t grown any since graduation. There was no personalization – no books on the shelves, no computers on the desks, no posters on the walls. 

There was, however, a Henry Skrimshander sitting on one of the beds.

We all get older. Most of us gain some weight and lose some hair. People tell me I’ve always looked younger than my true age – blame genetics and a healthy diet – but I can see the lines, the gray hairs. If I don’t look forty-seven, I do look forty. Henry, however, could probably sign up as a freshperson again and they’d still worry about him being homesick.

He looked up and smiled at me as I sat down on the edge of the opposite bed. How many nights had we lain here in the dark together, talking softly, swapping dreams and concerns? 

“I’m sorry I ruined your rug,” Henry said finally.

“I did warn you.”

He smiled. “You’re playing tomorrow?”

“Naturally. The Harpooners seem to have terrible luck whenever I’m not playing. Honestly, though, I’ve barely picked up a bat in years. Maybe we can play for twenty-five strikes? There’s a good chance I’d hit at least one.”

There’s a Broadway softball league Wai plays for some of the time. Sometimes we go out on dates to the batting cages and do our very best impressions of Henry Skrimshander up to bat, top of the ninth, all to play for.

I looked around, breathing in as if the smell could possibly be the same. “I wish I could say this reminds me of simpler times.”

My blissful days with Jason Gomes and weeks of heartache afterward. The physical pain of my concussion and broken cheekbone. Pella cheating on Mike in my bed. Henry disconnecting from the world, trying to disconnect from his own body. And a certain college president sitting here in my chair like a little boy lost, asking me what to do.

Henry scratched his mop of blond curls. “Some of them were simple. I played a lot of Tetris.” He paused. “I wouldn’t go in the bathroom. The grout’s kind of dirty.”

“Some things never change.”

That night we sat and watched an action movie, the four of us – Mike, Henry, Ev and myself – with pizza and beer, and soft drinks that were ostensibly for your grandson, although we pretended not to notice when he picked up a Heineken instead of a Coke. The movie was brainless and unimaginative, but it was good to be among friends.

After leaving a goodnight message for Wai, I intended to sit up late and write, working on edits, but I fell into bed soon enough, my dreams a swirl of baseball and bathtubs.

The next morning Mike drilled Henry and me on the front lawn as we ran through yoga stretches I’ve fortunately kept up with over the years. Henry bounced from position to position gamely enough, while Mike’s knees creaked and protested. After that, we took off on a jog around the neighborhood. I don’t think I’ve intentionally run anywhere since my days on the Harpooners. Fortunately Ev, the only one likely to seriously show me up, had already been dispatched to the airport to pick up his mother.

Pella and I barely knew each other at all when you died. We had met only twice, I think, but by the time I left for Tokyo she’d come out of her initial shocked grief enough to accept me just a little. Perhaps she needed to believe that our relationship had been something more meaningful than a crush, a silly May-December romance that could never last. She wanted to think that when her father died he’d been in love, happy and content for what might have been the first time in his life. It was a good thought to have and, I hope, not altogether false.

We e-mailed while I was in Japan, swapping memories of you, trying to make sense of your life and death. Those e-mails trailed into our studies, to discussions of literary theory, to Foucault and Derrida and, eventually, to the boys in our lives – Mike and Henry, and the various men who had the misfortune of dating me in the years before I met Wai. We’ve been closer than friends ever since.

She arrived at the baseball field just as Mike had run us into the ground with “warm ups” that were allegedly supposed to prepare us for the game rather than leave us unable to play at all. Rick O’Shea and Adam Starblind were swapping jokes that became progressively dirtier every time I walked past them. Henry was already bouncing up and down on the turf, ecstatic happiness in every fiber of his being.

“Bella Pella!” We hugged enthusiastically and kissed each other's cheeks like the good, cultured Europeans we so often pretend to be. “How’s Chicago? Am I ever going to tempt you to New York?”

“What do you mean ‘ever’? My students barely see me. How’s that gorgeous better half of yours?”

“Getting better by the day.” We sat down on the bottom bleacher, arm in arm, watching Ev stroll out to pitch a few balls to his father. “Your kid is really growing up.”

She smiled. “And I admire my dad every minute of it. How he didn’t either throttle me or lock me in a museum case for safekeeping remains a mystery.” For a moment she watched him thoughtfully. Ev’s no natural at baseball, but he’s an athlete and he tries hard. “Did he tell you about his tattoo?”

I looked at her in mock-shock. “He didn’t.”

“Inevitable, really. Schwartzes get circumcised, Affenlights get whales. Both forming a holy covenant with our father in heaven.” She nodded out at the field. “Going to get a hit for my dad today?”

“He hated baseball, you know.”

“He went to every one of your home games.”

“Well… that was me, not baseball, and he was a sweetheart.”

Pella nudged me. "So get a hit for the pride of Westish and not wanting to be beaten 25-0 by the local high school."

Our competition for the day – and much of our team – came from Westish High, whose students are frequently the children of Westish faculty and staff. For the privilege of having Starblind and Skrimshander on our team, to say nothing of Mike and even less of Rick and me, we'd drawn a few of their benchwarmers to allegedly even the score.

"They're eighteen years old," Rick whined. "They've barely been tempted by beer and food and being able to spend the whole weekend on the couch."

"Speak for yourself." Adam slapped his apparently still rock-hard midsection. "Skill and experience over energy, right Schwartzy?"

Mike managed to nod and shrug at the same time. "I think their entire team is taller than Henry."

"Steroids in the water," Rick intoned. "I bet their girlfriends do coordinated dances too."

As the alleged home team, we were fielding first. I wandered out to right field, wondering how many lefties the high schoolers might have and whether I really should have brought a book. Rick was at first base, Adam pitching, Mike catching, Henry… Henry was bouncing up and down at shortstop, skipping, crouching, and positively vibrating as though he had more energy than an entire brigade of high school students. On the way out, I exchanged a glance with the skinny kid we'd recruited for center field. There was just no explaining Henry. But then, these kids had grown up on his games. Perhaps the glance was less of a "can you believe this guy?" than "I can't believe I’m on the same baseball field as Henry Skrimshander!"

I had a quiet game by Major League standards, an incredibly busy one by my own. Rick's fitness and overall sharpness was a little lacking, to say nothing of my own, so I found myself backing up missed catches on a few occasions and batting third, which wasn't too bad given my lack of practice. It was the first time I'd played with Henry since Coshwale, when he'd walked off the field and I hadn't even made it off the bench. 

I won't bore you too much with details, as I know you were a football fan if anything, and not much of one either. Suffice to say the Westish High side made the most of their talent combined with youthful speed and energy, and Adam probably backed off his pitches a little to make sure it wasn't a complete no-hitter. His ego may have improved since I last saw him. But there wasn't a power on this earth or beyond it that could've made Henry miss or drop one ball. 

Sometimes perfection can be terrifying, or arrogant, or at the very least daunting. When Henry plays, everything in the world simply seems right, balanced, and how it should be. It’s startling for me to think that he’s almost fifty now – we’re all almost fifty – and no doubt he’d miss and drop plenty of balls if he were still playing professionally. But that thud of the ball in his glove, his hand, someone else’s glove… All the weariness and tension peels away from my soul. “It’s all right,” I think. “Henry’s got this.”

We played to a slightly contrived draw: handshakes and hugs all round. I passed out celebratory mints. 

So. Mike coaches, Pella teaches, and Henry seems to be going back to school after an impressive career in pro baseball. We’re none of us so far from our dreams that they seem unrecognizable. When I came to Westish the first time, my intention was to write – to write so much and so well that I couldn’t be ignored. In the years since, the term “prolific” has been applied to me more than a few times by kind reviewers. And yet… I’m no more secure in the position of a writer than you were.

Still, I’ve had plays produced, a couple of which were very widely applauded. I edit and write for a literary journal, opine away on politics and environmental issues in the broadsheets and magazines. I lecture when and where people ask me to, which is frequently enough that Mike’s sent me all those notes of yours on public speaking.

I’ve published one book, a novel. It did quite well. 

I began work on it in Tokyo, mostly as a way to work through my various conflicting thoughts about you and all the events of my junior year, although I’d already completed my doctorate before it was finished. My academic papers and my plays took precedence, perhaps, but in many ways I was frightened by what the others might think: Pella and Henry and Mike.

In the interviews I gave at the time, when the novel was garnering good reviews and being spoken of as the Great American Novel (yes, another one), I was sweetly evasive regarding my inspiration. I had changed the names, of course, and fictionalized certain details, but for anyone who cares to undertake even a rudimentary investigation, it’s all very plain to see.

I gave the final draft to each one of them – mailed it out to Westish and Chicago and St. Louis, with an anxious note about how I would naturally never seek publication if anyone had the slightest reservation.

Henry was the first to respond, oddly enough. “It’s great,” he said over the phone. “Do it.”

“They’re going to figure you out easiest of all,” I pointed out, my own devil’s advocate. How many shortstops had had a crippling bout of the yips in their junior year? How many, if it came to that, had been my roommate?

“Good,” he said. “You made me sound like a real poet.”

Mike called a few days later. We discussed certain elements of the novel in depth, including the possible legal ramifications of some of our alleged actions. I made a few changes. 

“Do you know if Pella’s read it?” I asked.

“I’m not sure if she’s finished.” He paused. “I hope you’re not just putting words in Affenlight’s mouth.”

I did my very best to reassure him, but Pella never called at all. Instead I received a letter, forwarded to my address in NYC from Cambridge. Handwritten – who writes letters these days? _If it’s not true, I don’t want to know,_ she wrote. _Get it published._

The book was indeed published, to some small fanfare, and dedicated to “My own dear friends”. The sales and critical reviews were good enough that my publisher gave me an excuse to visit book festivals in Europe and Australia. I took Wai with me, as he was conveniently moping around between roles at the time. It was a nice vacation for us both. But, with one exception I’ll explain later, I’m no real novelist.

After the game, we sat around on the grass, drinking lemonade and beer in the sunshine, Henry and Adam each with their own little posse of high schoolers and parents gathered around, seeking autographs and gossip and tips. I took my new center fielder friend under my wing and did some batting practice with him and a few of his buddies. They might never make even Division III college baseball teams, but then there had to be someone to cheer on little Owen Dunne once, too. Not to mention the even littler Henry Skrimshander.

By the time we were all out of breath and muscle power, and I'd returned the kids to their parents, the crowd had dispersed a little. I was intending to rejoin Pella, who was talking to and doubtless being hit on relentlessly by Adam, but a vaguely familiar face caught my eye. Had I seen him in New York or Cambridge, I probably wouldn't have recognized him. It was the fact that he was still here, albeit twenty-five years older, that jogged my memory: boyish face, wispy ash-blond hair, pale complexion...

"Dean Melkin!" I grasped his hand and shook it enthusiastically. "How are you? And it is still dean, isn't it?"

He was, perhaps, caught a little off-guard by my enthusiasm. "Ah, yes. Yes it is, in fact. Good to see you boys haven't forgotten everything. That was quite a season, eh?"

I was reasonably sure he had never come to even one of our games. "Quite a season," I agreed.

"Mm. I was actually… Would you have a moment, Dr. Dunne? There's a matter I'd quite like to discuss with you privately. Perhaps we could take a stroll over to Scull Hall?"

For a moment, I felt as nervous as I'd once been sneaking in and out of your apartment, as though I were still a student who could be reprimanded and expelled. But I smiled and tried to remember the benefits of age. "Of course. It'll be nice to see the old place again."

Scull Hall has changed since your day and our days. The walls still seem similar enough, the old walnut that seems to have stood since Melville once spoke here, but most of the furniture has been replaced and the carpets are new. They’ve had five presidents since you died, none of whom has lasted your eight years in the job. If anyone was ever dissatisfied with your dedication or charisma or financial acumen, I think some opinions may need to be revised in retrospect.

The desk is still the same, though, that heavy, solid, unmoving desk that used to be mostly buried in your papers. I wonder how many of the scuffs and scratches in its surface are from slips of your pen, kicks of your heels. 

I remember the first time I ever set foot in that office, leaning back against the door as if appointed gatekeeper. We had come, my environmental group and I, to petition you about a variety of issues. You were kind and reasonable, even in the face of angry rhetoric and frustrated mutters from some of my friends, and spent altogether far too much time gazing dreamily at me.

Perhaps two months later we were kissing in that office, making love, baring our souls through Chekhov and orgasm. The love seat there now is a different one, and the layout has changed. Still, I remember it all too well.

“So, Dr. Dunne.” Dean Melkin stood with his back to the desk rather than behind it, fingers braced on the edge. “It’s quite an honor to have your class back with us. Most years don’t bring with them such esteemed alumni.”

I closed the door gently and leaned back against it as I had so many years ago. “Henry and Adam have certainly been an inspiration to future Westish Harpooners,” I said. “And all those playing Division III ball.”

“Ah, yes.” His lips pursed, as if by confirming his statement I’d almost irrevocably thrown him off track. “But your own career has been quite remarkable as well. My wife and I saw your play in Chicago last summer, er… Now, what was the title?”

“ _Yield No Epitaphs_.”

“Yes, of course. Sheer brilliance. And we have your book at home. Such a riveting read. I was amazed it didn’t win the Pulitzer.”

“Well, nothing did that year.”

Of course, this was also the room where you died. I remember coming here the day after, fresh off the plane from South Carolina. Mrs. McCallister and I sat with Pella upstairs until she fell asleep, and it seemed as though she’d done enough crying for all three of us. 

I walked down the narrow staircase in the middle of the night and stood in your darkened office. You’d spoken to me by phone the previous afternoon, and I’d spent the flight trying to recall and immortalize precisely what we’d said. Had there been any hint of ill-health in your words or tone? Had I said what I needed to, so that when you died, at least you died knowing you were loved?

Henry told me that you’d come to our room, roused him from the bathtub, got him to eat something, and held him when he cried. It was never too hard to figure out that you went back to Scull Hall, put _Faust_ on the stereo, smoked a cigarette, and went to sleep. Mrs. McCallister said the entire building was freezing when she arrived, the thermostat turned way down. It broke my heart to think of you shivering, cold for my sake, simply because of thoughtless words I’d murmured once in your ear. 

That night, I lay down on the love seat where we’d kissed and where you’d died, staring up at the ceiling before closing my eyes and imagining you reading to me once more: Chekhov, Shakespeare, or clichéd critical examinations of honored texts. You should have been an actor. You could rouse – or even _a_ rouse – an audience as easily as lull them to sleep.

I was woken the next morning by Mike Schwartz swearing loudly in my ear and shaking me so hard I almost fell on top of Contango. 

“I thought you were dead too,” he said, and hugged me like I’d never need to breathe again.

Now, the office once more bright and warm, Dean Melkin’s words were nothing I needed to brand into my mind for posterity.

“I know the students think very highly of your lectures,” he was saying. “It’s so hard to genuinely inspire young people these days. I have no idea how Affenlight did it. He had a gift, that man. But then I know how close you two were.”

“Guert was quite the public speaker.” _Did_ he know? Many people have guessed about us following the publication of my book and my ongoing involvement in your work, but very few people would claim to _know_. Then again, Melkin had been at the college when our meetings were entirely above-board, carried out with the door open and Mrs. McCallister in the next room. When I had my cheekbone smashed by Henry’s errant throw and you rode with me in the ambulance. When I wept at your funeral.

“Yes. Yes he was.” He was focusing on the carpet in front of my feet. “I suppose you know our current president, Dr. Hamilton? I’m afraid he’ll be leaving us shortly. Has already left in the physical sense, in a matter of fact. Health issues, poor man.”

“I hadn’t heard.”

“No, well, we’re hoping to make the announcement shortly, when we already have a successor to name. Continuity and all that.” Melkin smiled at me a little nervously. “And in fact, Dr. Dunne, we were hoping you might think of making speeches to the student body on a more regular basis.”

You’d be disappointed in me for being so utterly taken aback. 

“I… what?”

“Naturally there will be official interviews, vetting, and so on, but we’re hoping to speed the process along somewhat given the circumstances, and of course you’re very well known to the trustees. Hometown hero, as it were. Really quite similar to when Affenlight was appointed.”

I had the sense of being in the completely, embarrassingly wrong place. “No, no no. I’m honored of course, but Pella… I mean, you should be asking Pella. She’s much more of an academic than I am. And she’s older, not that you should mention that to her.”

Melkin’s smile was broader, more genuine now. “Actually, Dr. Affenlight was one of the first to recommend you. Very highly, I might add.”

I was unsure whether Pella had mentioned my name as a favor to me, or simply to avoid taking on the position herself. “You do know that I’m gay. And married. To a man,” I added, helpfully. Social attitudes have progressed in the past quarter-century, but few colleges wouldn’t at least hesitate over those facts. “Also, I live in New York. I couldn’t possibly…”

“Oh, of course the apartments upstairs would be at your disposal. Very nice they are too, even if the last few presidents have lived in town instead. The salary doubtless won’t match what they pay in New York, but I’m sure we can work out an arrangement to allow you the freedom to write. There’s the summer vacation, of course… Oh yes, and your husband, Mr. Anderson, isn’t it? My wife absolutely loves that cable series he was in. We’re quite eager to meet him.”

“Really?” I said numbly.

The last time I was so utterly unprepared to be steamrollered into agreeing to something was when you phoned my mother’s house and convinced me to be Henry Skrimshander’s roommate. And look where that got us.

When Melkin finished selling me on the job, I found myself outside by the Melville statue, unsure whether to call Pella and demand to know whether this was a joke or payback, or to phone Wai and… I phoned Wai.

“They want me to be president,” I told him. 

Silence.

“Are you awake?”

“Yeah, of course. I’m already at the theater. Did you say president?”

“Yes.”

“Of the United States?”

“No, you goof, of Westish. Westish College.”

“Oh. I guess that makes more sense. Barely.”

“So… what do you think?”

“Um, sure. Why not?”

 _Why not?_ All the anxieties and fears of my soul were difficult to condense into anything like actual reasoned arguments against it. I surely was qualified, or at least as qualified as anyone else had ever been. But then so were many other people. Personally I would have nominated Pella and, failing her, Mike. Both Westish graduates, both accomplished in their own fields, both capable of smiling and delivering a rousing speech. But Mike didn’t need the stress, and Pella didn’t need the weight of your death on her shoulders any more than it already was.

“Well, I’d have to move here. It’s in Wisconsin, Wai. Do you know how far away from real life that is? There’s no movie theater. There’s no _mall_. I think they only repealed the sodomy laws last week.”

Wai was chuckling. “Oh my god, O. Your mother is going to be so proud. Hell, _my_ mother’s going to be so proud. I married a doctor _and_ a president.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“I’m completely serious, baby. My play closes in three weeks. Then I’m free to participate in bake sales or embroidery classes or whatever else the Westish wives do.”

“The faculty’s about two thirds female. Mostly straight females.”

“Then I’ll toss a football and put up shelves with the Westish husbands. I’m flexible.”

“Wai. This isn’t just a summer thing. This could be for ten years. Longer.” It could also be for the rest of my life, which is never necessarily more than ten years. 

“I know. But I know how much you love the place, and they do have airports in Wisconsin. It’s not like I’m good company when I’m working anyway, and it’d be nice for one of us to have a regular nine-to-five job… We’d figure it out, if you want to do it.”

“…right.”

“O?”

“Yes?”

“ _Do_ you want to do it?”

I said something deliberately vague and let him continue with his pre-show preparations while I took a long, lazy walk around the campus at twilight. It certainly is beautiful out here, the gorgeous old buildings, the sports fields filled with hope for triumph, and of course the lake, calling to even those of us who do not have whale tattoos and have never even accidentally studied marine biology. 

Long ago, when I was twenty-one and knew everything, it seemed like a strange sort of sequestration you’d doomed yourself to, this exile from culture and society and even most of academia. You’d been a star at Harvard, could have been a star almost anywhere. And yet you’d come here, certainly not for money or family, although it was, I think, for love. 

Strolling around campus, I thought I could see a little of what you saw in it all. The beauty, the potential, and also the familiarity. It’s good to have a home, nicer still to choose that home and to choose it among friends.

Wai and I could buy a house, a real house for once. Or perhaps it would make more sense to live in Scull Hall, if I’ll mostly be by myself for long stretches at a time. If I seem to be walking a little too eerily in your shoes, I’ll have to make changes. Perhaps Wai and I should finally have that talk about kids. Maybe we should foster or adopt a child, raise him or her at Westish in the shadow of Melville and Affenlight Field and see what happens. I’m under no illusions that I’d be a natural at parenting, but something in me would like to see life in Scull Hall again.

My wanderings took me, inevitably, to the cemetery, where a flat headstone is still engraved with your name and dates. In the months following our little moonlight escapade, I was convinced you’d wash up on some Lake Michigan shore, scaring the shit out of a fisherman or jogger, and the four of us – including, possibly, Contango – would be summarily rounded up and thrown in jail. But nothing ever happened. Perhaps your bones are just where we left them, gradually turning into coral, becoming the landless lake itself.

I sat in the grass by your grave, wishing I had some scotch. It always seems appropriate to bring alcohol to a cemetery.

It’s tempting to think that all the love and admiration I hold in my heart for you is largely a result of your death. I can never move on from what I felt when I was young and immortal and an incurable romantic. I dated Jason Gomes for much longer than you and I were together, and when I was with Jason we spent almost every moment in each other's company: classes, clubs, dinners, movies, sex and sleep. Somehow, though, the moments I spent with you resonate more deeply. Perhaps that’s because they truly meant more. Perhaps it’s because you’re the one who died. If you’d lived we might have argued and fought, or simply drifted apart. But I hold onto you the way you yet have a hold on me. From the first day I read the first lines of your book, you’ve been influencing and shaping my life, giving me the courage and strength to be who I am. 

Even without the scotch, I cried a little. I think I’m more maudlin now than I ever was when I was young.

I walked back to Mike’s house in the half-dark, the Westish streets easy enough to navigate, the street lights shedding a warm orange glow on the sidewalks. Out in front of the house, Ev was busy unloading beer cases from his dad’s pickup. 

“Was I gone so long you turned twenty-one already?”

“I didn’t _buy_ them,” he said, biceps bulging. “We’re having a barbecue out back. Can you bring the other case?”

“Doubtful.” I saw Mike was on his way. “I’ll leave it to the experts.”

In the back yard, where chairs were gathered around a grill, I found the usual suspects: Henry studiously turning kebabs while Starblind offered advice, Rick popping open a beer can, Pella sitting back, smoking something that smelled familiarly unlike tobacco.

“My blood pressure and cholesterol are just fine, thank you very much,” she said as I sat down next to her, taking the joint from her fingertips.

“Of course. The Affenlight women live forever.”

“If you ever see Ev smoking _anything_ , you have my permission to set him on fire.”

“Aye aye.” The barbecue smelled grotesquely good. I took a drag on the joint, gave it back to her. “So. The presidency.”

Pella looked guilty, even in the half-light. “Oh. That.”

“You want me sitting in Guert’s office, sleeping in Guert’s bed?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” she said, and grinned before slapping my arm. “Oh, relax. I’m sure they’ve changed the actual bed by now. And better you than a lot of other people.”

“Than you, you mean.”

“Maybe I’ll still get my chance. After it’s driven you to an early grave, Henry can put in a year or two, then Mike, then me. I’ll be the grand old lady of Westish. And by the time I’m done, Ev can be president.”

“Have you told Ev he needs to generate some offspring solely so there can always be an Affenlight at Westish?”

“He’s seventeen, Owen. As far as I’m aware, he’s already trying diligently to spread his seed over at least two states without needing any encouragement from me.”

I clinked my beer bottle against hers. “Maybe I’ll just have them set up an Affenlight statue. Guert can look out at the water with old Herman for all eternity. It’ll be the crowning glory of my administration.”

Pella looked at me with interest. “So you’re doing it, then?”

“I have to get through all the interviews and vetting. And if there’s anyone who’s not going to pass the trustee test it has to be me. My name’s Owen Dunne. I’ll be your gay mulatto president.”

She laughed. “I think they _know_ all of that. I bet they just wish you were female. Tick off all their minority boxes in one. Also, it would’ve helped if you’d grown up in poverty, that’s always a good sell.”

“I grew up in a local TV news station. Does cultural poverty count?”

Food intervened – beefburgers for most, tofu and a fried banana for me. The food was strictly secondary to the alcohol.

“What do you think he’d tell me to do?” I asked Pella as we sat outside and looked up at the utter blackness of the night sky. The vividness of the stars out here makes it seem a world away from the neon urbanity of New York or San Jose.

“My dad? I think the main advice he gave me was to stay away from men, which I don’t think is entirely relevant. God, I don’t know. Didn't he ever tell you anything?”

I thought about it. “He told me reading was a dangerous pastime and would only get me into trouble.”

“He was a wise man, my father.”

I was scheduled to fly back to New York the next morning. But as time wore on, as Henry gently woke me up after a very long lie-in I’d used mainly as a probable escape from a hangover, as Pella made breakfast and Mike read aloud from the sports pages at the table, it seemed very difficult to tear myself away.

“So, the _Iliad_ ,” Henry said when I had a mouthful of toast. “What’s it really all about?” He was tapping his fingers anxiously against his electronic reader, which was doubtless already packed with course materials for the coming semester.

“Oh, don’t ask the academics that,” Pella said, pouring coffee for all of us. “We could have a three-day conference and still not come up with anything definitive.”

Henry chewed his lip. “How am I supposed to write a paper on it, then?”

“You already wrote one, Skrim. About thirty years back.”

“ _You_ wrote it. And it _was_ thirty years back. Even if it was me…” He scratched the crown of his baseball cap. “I feel like I’ve lost brain cells every year since we graduated. Owen and Pella just got smarter and smarter, and I just got better at hitting balls and worse at answering press questions.”

Pella grinned. “If it makes you feel any better, Achilles wasn’t so great at PR either.”

“Are you kidding me?” Mike cleared his throat. “We’re talking about him now, thousands of years after his death, as a hero and a demi-god and one of the greatest warriors who ever lived…”

“And academic consensus is he was kind of a douche.”

Mike recoiled as if he’d been stung. “Oww.”

“Now, now,” I said, clearing the air with a consolatory butter knife. “It’s unfair to judge him by the sensitivity standards of the modern metrosexual man. Achilles was a fictional construct designed to serve a specific narrative function… The only things that make him infinitely complex are the viewpoints of the real, flesh and blood scholars. Like Henry.”

“I don’t know, Owen…” Pella was scrutinizing Henry with a friendly air. “Plenty of people have had viewpoints on Henry too. Reporters, fans, scouts… And of course he’s also a character in a book.”

“I have no idea what you’re referring to.” 

Henry smiled. “It’s okay, Owen. I really enjoyed it. At least I knew what that one was about.”

There were a lot of hugs and kisses before I left – Henry and Ev were staying with Mike for the summer, and Pella was intending to remain at the college for a few days at least, doing some reading and walking by the lake and in general getting away from life. But when I went to bid her goodbye, she snatched up Ev’s car keys from the table. “I’ll drive you,” she said. “My son’s had more than enough opportunities to kill you already.”

I suppose I looked miserable while we drove. She touched my elbow as I gazed out at the stream of cars, not really seeing anything, not even thinking of Wai as I should have been. “Sorry to leave?” Pella asked.

I used to find it so easy to leave Westish. There always seemed to be so much _more_ out there, waiting for me. But as I get older – and perhaps it’s _because_ I’m getting older – there seems to be more for me on that little campus by the lake. I look at that photograph of you sometimes, and think about how adamantly you insisted that twenty-year-old boy wasn’t the same person as the man you became. In a way I still see myself the way you would remember me – twenty or twenty-one, young and carefree in that almost intense manner I cultivated as a teenager. And, at times, all the learning and experience of the past twenty-five years falls away and I am still the Owen you knew.

“I miss him,” I said, and turned from the window. “I know I don’t have any right to. I was his friend for a few weeks a quarter-century ago. But there always seems to be an absence at the heart of the college without him.”

Pella frowned slightly. “You have every right to. I miss him as well, and you knew him much better than I did, at the end.”

“Not as well as I’d have liked. We were always so rushed, so anxious about everything. We never had the opportunity to just _be_. What I’d have given to spend even one afternoon with him in the sunshine by the lake, not doing anything.”

I always worry I’ll drag Pella into my melancholy when I get like this. She always smiles. “You can have my childhood if you like. Half my pre-pubescent life was spent sitting around next to bodies of water, or on them or in them, praying to God – or Melville or Thoreau – that my dad would stop trying to bore me to death.”

“It could probably have been worse.”

“Sure, California boy. Spend a few winters in New England and we’ll see how much you like it.”

After I graduated, I stayed on at Westish to teach playwriting at the summer school for another year. Pella was, of course, still a student at the time. Somewhere between the various scotch and marijuana-induced hazes of that glorious summer, the two of us sat in a dark, dark room and watched four minutes and twenty-five seconds of your life.

Do you remember a little road trip you took between Cambridge and New Haven, when Pella was perhaps eight or nine? It was the winter, icily cold from shore to shore, and yet you stopped by some isolated strip of coastline, much to your daughter’s dismay. The only thing that prevented her from sitting in the car and sulking was the fact that you’d given her a little video camera for Christmas. She mostly used it to record herself and her friends, filming postmodernist studies of Harvard life, but on this occasion her father was, alas, the most interesting thing around. 

You were probably the age I am now, more or less. You’d already shaved off the beard I’ve seen in photo albums, and your hair was the gray-silver I remember, if a little shaggier than that of your average college president. It was only when I started looking at photographs that it even occurred to me that I’d never seen you wear anything but a suit. There, on the frozen, overgrown sand you sat in jeans and one of those thick woolen fisherman’s sweaters you get in Nantucket or Long Island or Macy’s. Watching you in the palpably cold stiffness of the moment, it was easy to forget you weren’t alone, lost in the misery of yet another girlfriend leaving you, perhaps, or with the death of Pella’s mother weighing on your mind.

But then a voice intoned, with childish solemnity: “Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul…” And you laughed, stretched out beckoning fingers, and let a little girl wrestle you into submission in the sand while you both hollered out the rest of the quote at the top of your lungs. I’d forgotten that you were never sad by the water. It’s the one place you could never be sad, the one place you could always go home to. 

“I’m going to e-mail you the proofs when I get home,” I said in the car. “We’re just about done. Soon we’ll have a real book. Or an electronic one, at least. I’m still twisting arms over the dead tree version.”

“You twist those arms,” Pella nodded. “We are such relics, aren’t we?”

“Antiques,” I agreed.

We had coffee together at the airport, discussing all the mediocre sorts of things that are our lives now that we no longer have illicit affairs, run off with older men, go grave-robbing, or inexplicably win baseball championships. We’ve rarely felt anything that matches that emotional pinnacle of those few months back in 2010, but we have felt it. We live it, me with Wai, Pella with Ev, Henry and Mike with each other, in whatever way they find to express it. 

I hugged and kissed Pella goodbye, with the promise of e-mails and a swift return. And, well, I suppose I have one last confession to make. The book I have in the works – the one that’s at my publisher’s, running through final edits – is not entirely mine, and not entirely Pella’s, either.

I’d been in Tokyo for about a month, just getting past both the misery of the summer and the shock of being dropped into not only an entirely new city and school, but a completely unfamiliar culture. One afternoon my roommate dropped a package on my bed, airmail from the United States, return to Pella Affenlight, Westish, WI. Inside were about a hundred and fifty typewritten pages and a note from Pella:

_Thought my dad might want you to read this.  
Love, P._

I remember the sight of my tears falling on the title page: _Night of the Large Few Stars_ , but the ink was old and impossible for a little saltwater to smudge. 

You’d told me of the book on the last night we spent together, when I held you after we made love in your bed and you still seemed a thousand miles away. Later, despite sitting in your office with Mike on many afternoons, surrounded by your correspondence, I hadn’t recalled your words. I had wanted you, not paper, not even all the brilliance and wry humor that used to leap out at me from the pages of _The Sperm-Squeezers_. But alone in Tokyo, so very far from anywhere you’d ever been, I turned those pages with forensic care, heart pounding in my chest like the first time we’d kissed.

The book was far better than you gave yourself credit for, you know. It might not have been _Moby-Dick_ , but what has ever been _Moby-Dick_? I read it once without stopping, saddened and frustrated by the lack of an ending. The second time through, I thought of you, just a few years older than I was then, sitting with an old typewriter, trying to create your masterpiece.

The first chance I got, I phoned Pella.

“I want to finish it,” I said. “I want to try, anyway.”

There was a long, echoing, crackling pause before she answered. “I think he might’ve liked that. But I want to help.”

It’s been almost twenty-six years since that conversation, about sixty since you first began to write your Great American Novel. I thought we’d finish much sooner, but life of course got in the way for both of us: school, family, careers, love. Still, every few months, one of us would always send the other an e-mail, or we’d call, or a mysterious parcel would arrive in the mail. The book has grown far beyond your original hundred and fifty-three pages and now it’s almost finished, ready for publication.

I have no guarantees that anyone will read it, not even the intellectual or academic audience that delighted in _The Sperm-Squeezers_. My hopes are more in the direction of doing your vision justice, of fulfilling the dreams of the young men we once were. I admit it’s been nice creating a genuine Affenlight-Dunne production.

As I write this, I’m sitting in Mitchell Airport waiting on a delayed flight to take me back to NYC and Wai and my life. There will be proofs to approve, classes to teach, a new play to workshop. But soon enough I know I’ll find myself back here, back at Westish, walking in your footsteps, and perhaps finally here to stay.

If I’m no longer young, I’m younger than you were when you were made president, and you were far from being old. I still have a great many ambitions, a lot more to write and much more to learn. And more than anything I want to do it with my own dear friends, the people you introduced me to in one way or another, the boys and girl who, like me, would go grave-robbing in darkest night simply to fulfill one last imagined request.

Once I thought that finishing your book would be a way to finally lay your memory to rest and let go, but I doubt that could ever happen. I doubt any of us would ever want it to. Would it be such a great waste for me to live your life over again? Author, teacher, father, friend? I could smoke a half-pack a day of Parliaments, take up rowing on Lake Michigan, force myself to really appreciate opera, let a twenty-one-year-old boy fall in love with me on some idle February afternoon…

I’m not you, Guert, any more than Pella or Ev is, any more than Mike or Henry is, any more than Westish is. But I still firmly believe that we’re all tiny pieces of one astonishing soul, each with our own slow and painstaking growth process to undergo. I look forward to the rest of mine, whatever it may be, however long it may take.

There’s so much more unfolding to do.

Sincerely,

O.


End file.
